[derefr]

My thought process here was that that is not a useful definition, because all the extra stuff this definition lets in, is not stuff people would usually agree to call “art” / understand your meaning if you referred to it as “art.”

Let me try my analogy again: if you’re the last human alive, and you invent a bunch of words used for thinking to yourself, are those a “language”? Or are they merely a verbal shorthand or formalism or mnemonic for your thought processes?

IMHO, the word “language” only has a meaning/application in the context of two or more agents speaking. It is a protocol to allow agents without exactly the same mind to share thoughts, by putting those thoughts into a standardized schema separate from one’s own internal mental schema. If only you (or you and emulated copies of yourself) are communicating, then you won’t need such a separate model—you can just transmit the internal schema data structures directly.

[ctdonath]

As counter-argument, I reference the Voynich Manuscript: clearly a language is used to share thoughts, even though only the author (presumably) understood it.

I come to this definition of "art" precisely because so much of what is deemed "art" today "is not stuff people would usually agree to call 'art'", such as the "artist" shuffling around a pile of salt whilst on his knees for hours each day. Current art has done a great deal to eviscerate any sense of meaning (despite the pages of explanation accompanying every piece thereof), leaving me with my working definition: that which is made for the sufficient purpose of being perceived. I don't like the definition, being devoid of any aspect regarding improving the human condition, but that's what I'm left with.

[derefr]

> The Voynich Manuscript: clearly a language used to share thoughts, even though only the author (presumably) understood it.

The Voynich Manuscript has been referred to as a "personal shorthand" rather than a "language" quite often. "Language" is a specific term, and "being used to exchange ideas between people" seems to be part of the definition as people care to use it.

We do call large systems of grammar+vocabulary invented by one person "con-langs", which suggests they are "languages" — but we only call them that when those languages have usage guides published, such that other people could theoretically attempt to speak them. Before that happens, we don't really have a term for them. They're private thoughts in the creator's head. Do you need a term for that?

(What do you call hypothetical semantics underlying the random runic scripts used to decorate buildings in sci-fi movies, that only the authors know the meaning of — if there ever was a meaning at all? Intuitively, "language" is not quite the right term there. Even if there is a fictional language in that fictional setting, the representative samples of writing aren't necessarily valid samples of it — especially if the authors never bothered to actually construct a language for those samples to be sampled from.)

> the "artist" shuffling around a pile of salt whilst on his knees for hours each day

My argument there is that a lot of people are conflating something being "bad art" with that thing being "not art." But they don't do it all the time. They still use "art" to mean "art", as well as using it to mean "good art." They'll use "artful" or "evocative" to talk about "good art", but they'll use "artistic" to talk about any "art", good or bad.

Art, like writing or music, is an act of communication. Art is seemingly described as "good" when it's powerful; that is, when it successfully communicates something, perhaps impactfully.

That has nothing to do with aesthetics, of course. Awful images can be good art, if they're powerfully awful images.

Bad art, then, is powerless: it fails to communicate. But this still doesn't mean it's not art.

Art isn't opacity; doing a really bad job of making art doesn't make the thing less art. It makes it lesser art — lesser according to some societal ranking function — but that's not the same thing as becoming less like what people mean when they say "art."

People who are speaking unintelligibly (perhaps because they're very drunk, say) are still speaking, rather than "making noises." They're still attempting to communicate an idea through the medium of sound to others, and that's what makes that noise they're producing "speech." Intelligibility doesn't come into the question of "is it speech." It only comes into the question of "is it a successful act of speech."

A human born in the wild, though, with no exposure to other sapient minds capable of engaging in exchange of ideas, isn't "speaking" when they make mouth noises. They don't even have the concept of "speech." They're not attempting to communicate any ideas to others. There are no others.

Art is, AFAICT, the same.